


You Are What You Have to Defend

by GretaRama



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Angst and Humor, Carlos in the Desert Otherworld, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hopeful Ending, M/M, Nightmares, Other, Psychological Trauma, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-19
Updated: 2015-03-19
Packaged: 2018-03-18 15:46:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3574966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GretaRama/pseuds/GretaRama
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cecil thinks Carlos doesn't belong in Night Vale <i>for now</i>. Carlos thinks maybe he doesn't belong in Night Vale <i>at all</i>. As their communication systems slowly break down and the two planes of existence start to pull farther apart, they both struggle with how to deal with this unhappy situation. Mega-angst, so very much angst. Sexy, sexy angst.<br/></p>
            </blockquote>





	You Are What You Have to Defend

**Carlos**

Carlos stands in his makeshift laboratory in the desert otherworld, listening to an old broadcast of Cecil’s show on NVCR. He hasn’t heard this one before, because when it originally aired he was at the Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex, first debunking the threat of the so-called “vast underground city,” then (embarrassingly) being attacked by the miniature but vicious denizens of the _tiny_ underground city in which he had been standing.

He listens, his hand moving unconsciously to place near his heart where some tiny city dweller once lobbed an explosive-tipped spear that had nearly killed him, as Cecil breaks down on the air. There is a small mark there, a scar where the gunpowder from the explosion penetrated the skin and stuck, like a tattoo.

“Let us take a moment to... _let us_...take this moment...Ladies and gentlemen, let us mourn the passing… _can't. I can't._ I am _still holding_ this trophy…I...we go now to this puh...pre-recorded public service announcement.”

The segment repeats itself over and over, but doesn’t lose any of its heart-punching force with repetition. Carlos fiddles with the electronic setup he has hooked to his phone, trying to figure out what has gone wrong. There doesn’t seem to be a scientific explanation, and Carlos can’t bring himself to believe that the universe, or some rogue god, is bending the laws of time and space and radio frequencies just to fuck with him. He switches off the mechanism and continues his work in silence. Without Cecil’s voice, the laboratory feels empty and several degrees colder.

He has stopped visiting the pictures inside the lighthouse. At first, he went almost every day to catch a glimpse of Cecil. The lighthouse initially showed him tiny moments, just enough to get him through the day. Cecil shaving, Cecil adjusting his sock garters ( _You know, they make socks with elastic on the top now,_ he had said once, to which Cecil had answered suspiciously, _And who, exactly, are ‘they?’_ ), Cecil and Janice watching “Gun Fury” for what had to be the fortieth time.

Gradually, the lighthouse showed him more. Cecil, coming home from work, taking off his glasses, folding them neatly on the side table and breaking into tears, weeping with the miserable abandon of a child, his face in his hands and tears dripping onto the carpet. Cecil, awake on the sofa in the wee hours of the morning, Khoshekh curled in the lee of his body as he stares at nothing with bruised and hollow eyes.

The worst is an event that sticks in Carlos’s brain like a splinter, sinking in deeper the more Carlos worries at it. Cecil, half-carried into his living room by Steve Carlsberg, propped on the sofa and plied with coffee and aspirin until he was finally alert enough to break down again, collapsing against Steve’s broad chest, body wracked by hiccupping sobs. He cried himself to sleep, hands clutching Steve’s shoulders, and Carlos will never forget the look of kindly concern on Steve’s face as he gently extricated himself from Cecil’s arms and covered his brother-in-law with an afghan before quietly leaving.

“Sometimes that tower drives people crazy,” Alisha had said when he last exited the lighthouse and they saw the shattered look on his face. “Maybe don’t go in there anymore.”

His cell phone has also begun behaving erratically. Sometimes he can get through to Cecil, sometimes he can’t.

“I don’t understand,” he tells Doug. “Dana said her phone worked the whole time she was here.”

Doug shrugs. “Sometimes we’re close to other places, and sometimes we’re farther. Sometimes our time goes faster, sometimes slower.”

“Have you ever tried to figure out if these shifts in space and time follow a pattern?” Carlos asks.

Doug looks at him for a long time. “Look man,” he says. “You’re the scientist.”

* * *

**Cecil**

Cecil’s nightmares came back almost as soon as Carlos disappeared. The radio station in Desert Bluffs, spattered with gore in quantities that didn’t even make sense, living things reduced to pieces so small it would have been impossible to tell what kind of animals the offal represented…if it hadn’t been for the teeth. His brain, working without volition, realizes that the reason it looks like at least forty people have been processed in a gigantic topless blender is because _that very thing_ , or something just like it, must have happened, and _oh great pitiless void where am I_? He feels the warm, sticky seep of blood trickling into his shoes. He remembers the awful visage of the thing that called itself Kevin, and more than that, a rapid-fire sequence of memories that strike against his brain like blows – covered mirrors, his brother’s face, a terrible all-consuming darkness, the sound of howling and blood. Blood everywhere.

He wakes up feeling like he has just landed in bed, heart pounding and hands splayed flat against the mattress. Gradually, he persuades his heart to slow, his body to relax. He remembers when Carlos was here, how he would use his hands and voice to soothe away the awfulness. How they might snuggle close and gossip for a while until he forgot to be scared, and how safe it felt to fall asleep in Carlos’s arms. How sometimes, when he woke up curled tight and keening like an animal, Carlos would caress his limbs into a state of delirious relaxation and kiss him until he couldn’t think, finding the center of his body with his warm, dark hands and replacing all fear with pleasure.

Now, he just lies awake, waiting for sleep that doesn’t come, and staggers through his days feeling lost and strangely unconnected to the things that happen to him.

The pity is inevitable, the consequence of his blatant, public humanity. He learned long ago (during the completion of his Machiavellian Diplomacy badge for boy scouts) that truth is the safest lie. His best defense is no defense at all; he lays his heart bare on the airwaves, it’s the only way for him to do what he needs to do. He trusts his listeners to parse his words more thoughtfully than Station Management does, and so far his trust has never been misplaced.

Old Woman Josie drops in with casserole dishes from time to time. The barista who sells him his coffee in an alley near the Barista District punches him lightly on the shoulder and says, “Sucks, bro.” He catches looks from Steve Carlsberg that make him wonder if his excruciatingly humiliating nightmare of being thrown over the man’s shoulder and carried bodily out of the bar at Applebee’s might not be a memory instead.

His hope is that, as he lives out his misery for everyone to see, as he daily announces his desire to bring Carlos back to Night Vale, nobody will notice his actual _efforts_ to bring Carlos back to Night Vale. Because no matter what any smiling god, angel, old oak door or unalterable law of the universe might decree, if Cecil is certain about anything it is that Carlos belongs with him, and therefore in Night Vale. It’s just a matter of figuring out what task needs accomplishing in the desert otherworld before Carlos will be permitted to return.

He manages to get through to Carlos at work during the librarian crisis. “Come home soon,” he says, hoping Carlos will offer some reassurance.

“I’ll see you soon, I promise,” Carlos says instead.

“I don’t know what to do with myself without you,” he says, with perfect, terrible honesty. “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” Carlos assures him. “And you know, Cecil, I’ll be fine. I’m a scientist. A scientist is always fine.”

Cecil wonders if Carlos notices that he, Cecil, is decidedly not fine.

* * *

**Carlos**

“You are what you have to defend,” was what his grandmother had told him, and Carlos had always found that to be true. In the town where he was born, he was most often seen as black, and so that part of his DNA that had come from his mother’s family had seemed like the most significant part of his identity. Later, he realized that attacks could come from unexpected directions; during his undergraduate studies in the northeast, he had often heard people referring to him, unexpectedly, as “that Puerto-Rican guy,” and so he had grown closer to his father’s genetic contribution to his makeup (although none of his ancestors had ever even been to Puerto Rico, as he often tried to explain).

During grad school in the Midwest, he had suddenly and unsettlingly become Mexican. “Go back to Mexico!” was a refrain he heard from pickup trucks at stoplights, muttered by passersby on the street, and even from checkers at the grocery store. Once, while kissing a date goodnight outside his apartment he had been reduced to helpless laughter by the driver of a car who had yelled “Go back to Mexico, queer!” as he drove past. His date had been confused by his amusement, and when he had finally stopped laughing he had explained that this was the most accurate insult he had heard in decades. “At least he got the queer part right,” he had said.

While attending a conference in Rio de Janeiro, he had been astonished to be read as white. Brazilian racism, he learned, operated on a completely different spectrum than North American racism. He had felt like a complete fraud, as though at any moment, someone would suddenly point to him and recognize him as an infiltrator into the cocoon of white safety that so many white people seemed to take for granted.

Night Vale, to put it mildly, was different. He didn’t have to defend any one facet of his biological identity. As dismayed as he had been by Cecil’s instantaneous and widely-publicized attraction to him, it had established his identity through traits that belonged uniquely and legitimately to him, with the obvious exception of Cecil’s insistence on his physical perfection. He wasn’t Carlos the black kid who won the science fair, he wasn’t Puerto Rican Carlos or Mexican Carlos or white Carlos, he was Carlos the scientist, the one with the nice hair and the even nicer smile. Being defined by his accomplishments, his skills and experience and yes, to a large extent by someone’s affection, left him with nothing to defend. People in Night Vale didn’t even make assumptions about his gender identity or – and this was truly remarkable – his biological sex. He was just Carlos, human and scientist and beloved of Cecil.

This memory of his acceptance leads, inevitably and searingly, to memories of every single time he rejected Cecil during his first year in Night Vale.

He simply hadn’t been prepared for such a public courtship; nothing like that had ever happened to him before, and it had taken a while for him to shake the idea that he was being teased or even mocked. He remembers feeling disappointed the first time he really saw Cecil, comparing the man’s unprepossessing physical attributes with his hypnotically attractive voice. He remembers the little hitch he could hear in Cecil’s voice every time he had declined to meet or discuss weekend plans.

He also remembers the first time he kissed Cecil’s soft, warm mouth, the electricity kindling in his belly as Cecil had responded to his kiss. Cecil was a good communicator, physically as well as verbally. That kiss had spoken of longing, of loneliness, of desire and delicacy and almost painful restraint. That kiss had told Carlos everything he needed to know about Cecil Palmer. It was a kiss that had said _welcome home_ , and he had taken it to heart.

He had felt that in accepting Cecil, he had accepted Night Vale, and had been accepted in return. The old oak door had shown him otherwise, and it is hard not to internalize something as absolute as an impossible cosmic door literally slamming in your face. It is hard for Carlos not to believe that he really doesn’t belong in Night Vale.

* * *

**Cecil**

Cecil spoons chicken and rice out of Josie’s Pyrex casserole dish and stares at the message scrawled in the bottom of the pan in fiery script. It blazes blue for a full minute: _You are what you have to defend_. Then it vanishes in a puff of tarragon-scented smoke.

He stares at the Pyrex for a long moment, then picks up his phone and dials Josie’s number.

“This casserole is delicious,” he says. “Is this one of your creations?”

“Actually, Erika made it,” she says. “They said they knew you’d love it. They also thought you might like to make it for Carlos some time.”

“I don’t know,” Cecil says slowly. “I’m not really sure it’s Carlos’s kind of dish. He tends to like less… _cryptic_ foods.”

“Hold up, let me put Erika on,” Josie says, and a moment later a pleasant, genderless voice sounds through the receiver.

“Hi Cecil,” the voice says.

“Hi Erika. I was just telling Josie how great this chicken and rice thing is.”

“I’m so glad you enjoyed it. The secret ingredient is love. The other ingredients are included on the recipe card I stuck to the bottom of the pan. Did you see it?”

“I did. I found it a little confusing, actually.”

“Oh dear. I tried so hard to be succinct. To be absolutely and incontrovertibly clear.”

“Well, it’s not so much confusion about the actual words,” Cecil says. “It’s more about what the, um, words, want me to do, I guess. If you see what I mean.”

“You know, it’s really hard to enjoy things like casserole if you’re going to overthink them,” Erika says a little testily. “Why not just eat the casserole, keep the recipe in mind for Carlos, and see what happens?”

“Okay,” Cecil replies. “Sure, yeah, I can do that.”

“Cecil?”

“Yes?”

“If you decide to try the recipe, don’t forget the love,” Erika says. “It’s the most important ingredient.”

* * *

**Carlos**

Carlos dreams of the Man in the Tan Jacket. In the dream, he sees the man waiting on his doorstep. The man turns, and his face is a blur, crossing Carlos’s eyes with the impossibility of attaining focus. Then there are a series of disturbing images –a gristly lump of flesh inside the casing of a watch, a swarm of flies, the buzzing darkness he remembers from his first date with Cecil. The Man in the Tan Jacket reaches out and taps Carlos once, right on the gunpowder mark on his chest, next to his heart. The charcoal-colored dot expands under his skin, spreading like squid ink.

The dream changes, then, to something more like a memory. Cecil, asleep and caught in a nightmare. Carlos sees hands – his own hands – alighting on Cecil’s shoulders, pulling him close. He feels the warmth of Cecil’s body against his, the tremors of his nightmare slowly dissipating.

Cecil’s hand takes his and he presses kisses into Carlos’s palm. “Carlos,” he says, snuggling in so the two of them are fitted tightly together. Awareness overcomes them slowly and the mood of innocent comfort turns into something altogether less innocent, less comfortable. Carlos shifts, feeling the familiar ache of arousal, trying to soothe himself against Cecil’s body. Carlos has never known anyone so sensitive and responsive, so willing and able to feel things in the here and now, never pushing anything aside to be dealt with later. At first he thought it made Cecil fragile, but he knows better now.

Cecil is moving against him with frank carnality, drawing an instinctive reply from his own body, and for a time there is nothing but the rush to the crest of their pleasure, the press of their two bodies, a gathering heat, a feeling of heady desperation.

Then, abruptly, Cecil is gone, and there is only a Cecil-shaped mass of flies, buzzing, red, multi-faceted eyes staring at him with detached interest as the heavy black bodies hover beneath shiny wings. Carlos tries to scream but he can’t even breathe.

In the background, barely audible, he can hear Cecil’s voice on the radio. It’s an old broadcast from last year’s Poetry Week. “I'm beginning to steal your voice,” Cecil reads. “The voice that lies, dying in the Dog Park.”

Somewhere, he hears a doorbell ring.

He wakes up to find Alisha’s car-sized dog cuddled behind him, snoring buzzily through her leathery black nose.

His body, his whole being, longs for Cecil with such an intensity he almost shouts with the force of it. He grits his teeth, letting the crisis pass. 

He reaches for his phone, presses buttons, lifts it to his ear.

There is no dial tone. Instead, he realizes he’s listening to NVCR’s live feed, to Cecil’s voice.

“Sadly, though, I am not okay,” Cecil says, his voice quavering slightly. “The falling animal carcasses collapsed a small section of the outer wall around our radio station. No one was injured, but it was the wall where my desk was. My new painting. I had spent so long on it. I mean, I can replace it, but…it’s just that. It’s…just that it brought me such happiness, such a reason to get up, such little joys.

Like, it’s not hard to find images of Carlos, we have science, with its phones and screens and psychic projections, and…but that picture…” Cecil sighs, “…it was art. Creation. Destroyed. I mean, I can paint another. I can. I can just paint another.

It’ll be fine. Just an excuse to do some fun painting. I’m glad we’re all okay. Diane’s okay, even Steve, I’m glad he’s okay too, I can just paint…

It’s fine.

Yup. Everything’s fine.”

“Cecil,” Carlos whispers brokenly. “Oh, my Cecil.”

* * *

**Cecil**

Cecil eats the casserole.

His greatest difficulty, since Carlos is gone, is filling his time. Before Carlos, his life had been more or less satisfactory, but now he doesn’t seem to be able to recapture the effortless stability of that earlier existence. So, he putters listlessly around the house, stares at the TV without paying any attention to it, and eventually gives up trying to amuse himself and goes to bed.

Sleep comes with surprising ease. He dreams of the black gateless walls of the Dog Park, of old oak doors, and doorbells. He dreams of Carlos, lost in the desert otherworld. 

“Hi Cecil,” says the dream-Carlos. “I keep trying to call but our worlds seem to be diverging more and more. All I can hear is your show, and even then it’s just pieces. Painful pieces,” he adds. “Emotional bullets, really. Heart-seeking missiles.”

“I’m sorry,” Cecil says. “I'm trying, I am, I want to stay..." he trails off, struggling to keep his voice level, upbeat. "I want to stay positive. It hasn't been easy for me. You have a new world to explore - and Carlos, that's fine, I want you to explore as many new worlds as you can find! I just wish..." he feels his face working and stops talking before he falls apart. 

"I miss you too, Cecil. I miss you all the time. I want us to be together, too. But you know I can't stay in Night Vale. The doors..."

"I know," Cecil says quickly. "I submitted my request for leave." As is the way of dreams, a copy of that request materializes in his hand and he passes it to Carlos. “I don't know if I've mentioned this to you, but I don't think I've had time off for...oof. Maybe fifteen, twenty years? I requested a copy of my contract to see if there was anything mentioned about time off, but...well, that didn't go over very well.”

“Oh, Cecil,” Carlos says, sinking down in the sand and sitting, cross-legged. He looks defeated. “I’m stuck. I don’t belong in Night Vale. I can’t come back there without endangering everyone. And what did I even accomplish while I was there, anyway?”

“You _saved_ Night Vale. If anyone belongs there, Carlos, it's you,” Cecil says. “Maybe there’s something you need to accomplish or discover in this otherworld, but once you do, you’ll be able to come back. We just have to understand why you’re here, or what requirement needs to be met in order for you to belong. If anyone can figure this out, Carlos, I know that person is you. _Please_ don’t give up.”

Carlos smiles up at him. “You know what amazes me about you, Cecil? You’ve been re-educated - I don’t even know how many times - but even if they took every single memory out of your head, I think you’d still be my sweet, subversive Cecil. They never really touch you, do they?”

“They do,” Cecil says quietly, kneeling in front of his boyfriend and taking his hands. “Of course they do. There are costs. But I’m willing to pay them if we can just be together again.”

“I’m not sure I’m willing to _let_ you pay them. Cecil, has it ever occurred to you that maybe I _really don’t_ belong in Night Vale? That whatever force it was that brought me here…” he gestured to the sandy vastness that surrounded them. “…did it to protect you?”

Cecil stares at Carlos in horror. “No,” he says. “Just…no.”

“I had a dream about the Man in the Tan Jacket,” Carlos says. “He touched me here,” he opens the collar of his shirt and shows Cecil the black mark. “There are so many things going on that I just don’t understand.”

Cecil stares at him for a long moment, then leans forward and kisses him on the lips. “Do you remember what you told me about how science works? It was when we went out for coffee, before you…before we started dating. You told me that there are patterns in the data, that if you just look at something from the right angle, sometimes you can see the pattern, and then everything makes sense.”

Carlos smiles wanly. “Yeah, I remember saying that,” he says.

“Well,” Cecil says. “I need you to look for patterns in the data now. Because from where I’m standing, I think I can see some. And if I can, I’m pretty sure you can find them, too.”

Carlos’s face changes, growing serious. "What patterns?"

Cecil feels something pinging in his heart at the gleam of interest in Carlos's eyes. "Dana. The Dog Park. The House That Doesn't Exist. Dana got here without any angelic intervention, Carlos. Maybe...maybe you can get back the same way?"

"Not the Dog Park," Carlos says automatically, but Cecil can see his mind working, his eyes flicking back and forth rapidly as he thinks. "But maybe, maybe you're right."

"I'm trying so hard, Carlos, and I don't want to make you feel guilty, or make you stop doing what you love, I truly don't. I can handle anyone else's pity but not yours...but I love you so much, and I...when I say I don't know what to do with myself, I mean...I mean I'm falling apart. I need you. I need you, Carlos, please find a way. Please." He stops, knowing if he continues he might never be able to stop, and might very well end up begging Carlos to just come home, no matter the cost. 

"I love you so much, Cecil,” Carlos says. "I don't know what's wrong with me. Of course. Of course I'll try."

“Thank you,” Cecil says, and he feels his eyes fill with stinging tears. “I miss you so much,” he manages to say. “This is really hard.”

A ferocious wind whips over the dunes, and suddenly sand is everywhere, filling the air. 

Carlos leans forward and hugs Cecil fiercely. “Look, Cecil, I’m worried about you. I had a dream…kind of a bad dream. I think it’s really, really important for you to stay out of the Dog Park.”

“Of course it is,” Cecil says, sniffling a little. “The Dog Park is forbidden.”

“Yeah, but…especially for you, okay? So just don’t go in there. Promise me.”

“Oh! That reminds me!” Cecil says, as the sand-filled wind gusts, stinging his face and nearly blinding him. “For some reason, I’m supposed to tell you that _You are what you have to defend._ Does that make any sense to you?”

“What?”

Cecil yells the phrase again, but then he can’t see Carlos anymore, and he finds himself once again in the vortex that leads to his nightmare of the Desert Bluffs radio station.

* * *

**Carlos**

Carlos wakes up in his rockshelter in the desert, and immediately fumbles for the little papyrus pad Alisha gave him for jotting down notes. He writes down everything he can remember about the dream, but it’s like trying to save a sandcastle from the tide; the more he tries to remember, the faster it washes away. Finally he looks down at his notes. He has written, “Retrace Dana. Dog Park. Wall. Desert Creek, Cecil, Danger.” He hesitates, then adds “You are what you have to defend.”

With a sigh he returns the notepad to the pocket of his lab coat and sits up. As he gathers his shoes and socks from the corner of the rock shelter, he notices something flapping in the corner. He leans down to pick it up and examines it. It is paper – not the papyrus or bark paper they use here, but familiar, smooth printer/copier stock, covered in laserjet-printed words. It is the second page of Cecil’s request for vacation time, and even though he knows, with absolute certainty, that this document cannot possibly have been handed to him in a dream, he simultaneously knows that this is exactly what has happened.

He reads the text on the page, tears forming in his eyes. He skims over several paragraphs in which Cecil discusses the importance of balancing misery and joy in order to provide adequate motivation for a workforce.

_I have never felt so balanced on the razor’s edge between joy and anguish as I have since I met Carlos. Although Carlos’s disappearance and subsequent long sabbatical in the desert otherworld have been painful for me in ways I never anticipated, I would not trade the hurt for anything. This pain is inextricably linked to happiness. Even if Carlos never returns from whatever plane of existence he currently inhabits, and even if my vacation request is not granted, my prolonged suffering would be a small price to pay for the year I spent with Carlos._

_That being said, it appears that my best prospect for any kind of reunion with Carlos is to find some means of traveling to whatever parallel universe he is presently in. The risks of this trip are high, and it’s entirely possible that I may be killed either in transit or by capricious giants upon my arrival; therefore, I recommend that one of the interns be trained in the details of my position so there will be someone to cover my duties in the event that I never return._

_You may wish to consider promoting an intern in any case, since my ability to do my job has been compromised by an insidious fog of depression that has left me feeling disconnected and lost. In the event that a reunion with Carlos is not possible, it is likely that I will retreat further into myself and eventually become a shut-in, curled in a dark corner of my bedroom, eating ice cream directly from the carton, with nothing for company but memories and Depeche Mode’s entire back catalog._

“What’s that?” Alisha asks, when Carlos makes his way down to their campsite. 

“It’s…I think it’s my boyfriend’s request for vacation time,” Carlos says. “I think he gave it to me in a dream. I mean, I don’t think that’s actually possible, but…” he shrugged and gestured at the sheet in his hand.

“Yeah, that kind of stuff happens,” Alisha says. “That’s how I got my Walkman.”

“Do you remember Dana, the intern who was here last year?” Carlos asks. 

“Sure,” Alisha says. 

Carlos takes a deep breath. “Do you remember which way she came from?”

“That way,” Alisha says, pointing. 

“I’d like to organize a research expedition to see if we can retrace her steps,” Carlos says. “Can you help?”

“I have two questions,” Alisha says, holding up two enormous fingers. “Will there be trouble? And what is the purpose?”

Carlos looks at the paper again for a long moment before folding it and slipping it into the breast pocket of his lab coat. 

“The first one is easy,” he says. “There will definitely be trouble.” He pauses and looks down at his hands. “The second one is harder. Have you ever heard of the expression _You are what you have to defend_?”

“No,” Alisha says thoughtfully. “It has a ring of truth about it, though.”

“I think I have a job to do, a job that involves Cecil, and Night Vale, and maybe other things, too; I’m not sure. I haven’t quite figured out what it is that I need to defend, but I’m going to go and find out. My boyfriend needs me.”

“So…the purpose of your expedition is love?”

Carlos smiles. “Yes. The purpose is love.”

“Okay then, sure,” Alisha says. “Let me go tell Doug.” They lumber off over a sand dune, their dog following at their heels.


End file.
